I’ve had to troubleshoot an app (DAZN) to figure out which ads it’s trying to post. Trial and error led me to figuring out that there was one interaction with doubleclick.net which I needed to allow in order to get the app to work properly.
Trouble is that the trial and error method was slow and labour-intensive, and this was just one app.
My question is whether there is a better way of determining which ads are critical to the operation of various apps.
Thanks
Josh
Hi,
Unfortunately I’m not aware of a method which makes this process easier, it’s not possible to directly map an app with a query (other than obvious domain names).
Perhaps if we could figure out a feature to assist with this.
One idea I’ve had for example: what if we had a way for you to “mark” whenever you discover an ad or broken app. Then we could keep a score on the last few seconds of queries with this mark. When you’ve done multiple marks over a period of time, perhaps one specific query would stand out 
Any other ideas or feedback about this would be appreciated!
Thanks for this.
Is there anything that occurs at capture-time that would represent, say, a call stack that you might be able to walk back through?
I was able to do this manually in Windows, even when the stack info was minimal (i.e. release mode), and later on some tools became available to do this in a more automated fashion.
Sampling (what we do now) isn’t ideal, but it does give us some data that we can use to start the process of elimination.
Would, say, a debug version of Blokada, or some switch to enable more detailed tracking, be a possibility?
Thanks
Josh
Nope, iOS is a locked down and sandboxed OS.
It’s not possible to see which apps are installed or which app that makes a connection even less which app that does a dns query. Except maybe if it’s registered to a user of an organization, then you get more control. But we can’t go down this route with Blokada.
But this is also a good thing, it means apps can’t fingerprint and track you as easily as on other platforms
As a rule of thumb, it takes a few passes of disabling and enabling Blokada to see whether it’s having any impact on the problem at hand.
So what might be very useful is just a “record mode” that you trigger with a button and which lasts for, say, 60 seconds. Output format TBD.
The other thing that would be very useful would be an accumulated customer-contributed table showing which references associate with which apps. There might be some legal stumbling blocks, but I think it’d be worth it.
I, for one, don’t understand why DAZN doesn’t just tell us which references we have to allow. After all, it’s in their interest as much as ours.
Josh
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